Getting howdy to run on fedora 43 (workstation)

in linux, fedora, howdy, gnome, biometric-login, note-to-self

This guide is a note to myself and based on this issue and Ronny's forked COPR version:

Step 1. Install COPR and howdy

sudo dnf copr enable ronnypfannschmidt/howdy-beta
sudo dnf install howdy howdy-gtk

This will take some time as >1GiB of packages are pulled in.

Step 2. Find your (IR) Camera Device and add to config

Run ls -la /dev/video* and then try every device with mpv like this mpv /dev/video0. If the video is flashing and black-and-white, you've likely found your IR camera device! (sudo dnf install mpv -y if you haven't installed mpv)

Add the discovered device to the howdy config by running sudo howdy config, search for device_path, add your device and save the file.

Step 3. Add your face

Run sudo howdy add or use howdy-gtk if you prefer ui.

Step 4. Add howdy as auth method

To use howdy for the gnome login screen, add

auth        sufficient    pam_howdy.so no_confirmation

as the second line to /etc/pam.d/gdm-password, by running sudo nano /etc/pam.d/gdm-password.

To use howdy as a general sudo auth method, add the line above as the second line to /etc/pam.d/sudo by running sudo nano /etc/pam.d/sudo.

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